Jews

P 3324 Part-time Christianity doesn’t work.

/ DVH

Ephesians 3:4-13 MSG.“As you read over what I have written to you, you’ll be able to see for yourselves into the mystery of Christ. None of our ancestors understood this. Only in our time has it been made clear by God’s Spirit through his holy apostles and prophets of this new order. The mystery is that people who have never heard of God and those who have heard of Him all their lives (what I’ve been calling outsiders and insiders) stand on the same ground before God. They get the same offer, same help, same promises in Christ Jesus. The Message is accessible and welcoming to everyone, across the board. This is my life work: helping people understand and respond to this Message. It came as a sheer gift to me, a real surprise, God handling all the details. When it came to presenting the Message to people who had no background in God’s way, I was the least qualified of any of the available Christians. God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure that it had nothing to do with my natural abilities.

And so here I am, preaching and writing about things that are way over my head, the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ. My task is to bring out in the open and make plain what God, Who created all this in the first place, has been doing in secret and behind the scenes all along. Through followers of Jesus like yourselves gathered in churches, this extraordinary plan of God is becoming known and talked about even among the angels! All this is proceeding along lines planned all along by God and then executed in Christ Jesus. When we trust in Him, we’re free to say whatever needs to be said, bold to go wherever we need to go. So don’t let my present trouble on your behalf get you down. Be proud!”

What a great teacher this man is! Paul really encouraged me with this passage, he puts everyone on equal footing and includes the people who-haven’t-met-Him-yet, as well as each other. There are no rock-stars in Paul’s theology. Jesus Christ is all in all and He is everything! It’s such pure brilliant revelation. This man of God definitely found his heavenly-calling – it was to help everyone he met find God and understand His Ways. Then he says something that just blows me away. “I couldn’t have done what I do without His help. I wasn’t equipped to do this job.”

Paul was brilliantly equipped to preach the gospel to the Jews, he knew the law inside and out. Yet God sent Peter – the fisherman – whose only qualification was that He loved Jesus – to the Jews … and Paul went off to the Gentiles. Do you see that? Neither man was well-equipped to “argue God’s case” to the people they were sent to. God’s qualifying feature is WE CAN’T DO IT.  So if you know you can’t do it, then you are half-way there! The other half is knowing the Holy Spirit and His ways, personally. 

If you feel like you are a failure because you may have done dreadful things, but you have the revelation that God is redeeming you, day by day, then you are equipped. That’s called humility BTW! Paul consented to the murder of Christians, and that horrible thing became one of his greatest assets. It helped to keep this man humble. Everywhere he went, people knew what he had done. He even had problems with the Lord’s disciples because they knew his reputation for murder! 

Don’t let the past dictate your future. Our God is brilliant at do-overs and He does them so well, they stop being do-overs and become new beginnings.  Please don’t give up on yourself when you fail either, go to Jesus and begin again. I tell myself daily: “Just one more time. I need to get up one time more than I fall down!” He’s the God of second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth chances etc. He won’t give up on you, so don’t you give up on your faith in His goodness.

Paul knew he was ill-equipped for the job God gave him, but His faith in God’s goodness was bigger than the things that happened to him along the way. Having a big faith IN GOD matters. The trouble is, most of us scrounge about trying to make our faith bigger. Set your EYES on our big God! Did you know that there are 3,600 types mosquitos in this world, and there are over 25,000 -35,500 kinds of fish, and 90 species of whales. Does our Father sound limited to you? 

The only thing that can limit God is sitting right above your shoulders. That 28-35 cm bit of skull, brain and flesh, can distort our thinking and deprive us of our part in Jesus’ plan for our lives. That’s why the bible says: ‘renew your mind’ … it needs renewing!  Have you ever caught yourself thinking something and then you suddenly realise you still have a childish view of reality? We all do it. Things happen and we get stuck. Our brains are definitely not perfect. 

But His love is. That’s the bit to remember. That’s what kept Paul going through so many trials and tribulations. Plus the wonder and joy that he discovered as the Holy Spirit revealed God’s plans for mankind. This greatly admired and learned man found out he knew nothing, and he accepted his ignorance with great joy, because it meant he could rely upon our God even more! We have nothing to contribute but ourselves and a total surrender to Him, daily. Part-time Christianity doesn’t work! Bye. 👋

P 2929 Maturity.

/ DVH

We live within a society that often judges maturity by age, plus the level of responsibility a person exercises. So we feel we are ‘grown up’ and mature when we hold down a job, and raise children – by providing clothing, shelter and food for them. But God sees maturity differently. Today I want to look at Moses, who saw incredible miracles – yet he was still human. However, Jesus attitude toward submission and obedience is our perfect example of how we need to live, NOW. Today. 

It seems as if Almighty God was unfair in His dealings with Moses, until we look more closely. This man missed out on the main reason he and the Israelites ended up on the road in the first place — he did not get to go INTO the Promised Land. He led more than a million Jews round and round for 40 years, saw huge miracles of provision and protection — all of this in a desert that the Israelites could have crossed in just a few days! It was not his leadership that was at fault, what brought about his faulty finale, was he stumbled over the immaturity of his followers.

We might have called Moses – who was 80 years old  when he started out  – mature. After all he was 120 years old when he died! But age is never the issue. It seems that this man of God still had unresolved anger issues toward the people he was leading, and that led to disobedience to the Lord’s specific instructions. His ignominious end didn’t come about because God didn’t dearly love this man, or care deeply about him. We know that because Almighty God arranged Moses’ burial. Personally I think he missed out because His character was not complete and leaders are meant to be examples of how the rest of us need to live.

The Lord’s greatest wish for each one of His children is that we become mature in Christ – not just that we are saved! Father God wants salvation for the whole world — but He desires MATURITY for Jesus’ disciples. The Lord Jesus’ maturity was complete in every way, in every detail. Read the book and count how many times Jesus’ said –“… it has to be so, for now.” Here is my point for today — maturity to God, is not the same as age.

Let’s read Ephesians 4:13 AMP: “[That it might develop] until we all attain oneness in the faith and in the comprehension of the [full and accurate] knowledge of the Son of God, that [we might arrive] at really mature manhood (the completeness of personality which is nothing less than the standard height of Christ’s own perfection), the measure of the stature of the fullness of the Christ and the completeness found in Him.”

If we are not careful we can sometimes mistake wisdom for maturity. Wisdom is a gift – we can ask for it and go after it. The book of Proverbs exhorts us to ask for it, over and over again. Do it!! Wisdom, by the way, is a Person, not just intellectual prowess. Proverbs tells us that. But true maturity is about allowing God to work in and on US – our character, our responses, our lives – until what He wants for us is more appealing in our eyes, than what we think we want or need. 

Maturity flourishes in the joyful expectation of God’s goodness in the middle of utter chaos. A mature Christian knows their God, and deals with themselves accordingly. Maturity is the ability to accept God’s will, God’s way. Just to be clear – this Grace is not about resignation, or even careless indifference — instead it’s the joyful anticipation that God will do something wonderful with whatever is going on in my life, no matter how it currently looks. 

Jesus knew exactly what was in front of Him when He faced the cross, and He did not flinch or falter. In the Garden of Gethsemane He wrestled with His flesh to bring it into submission to His Father’s will. Maturity has nothing to do with feelings, it has to do with developing and allowing our faith to be stretched. That faith is in God’s ability to take a total disaster and make it into something so spectacular it blows your mind. 

Maturity has learnt to wait, always alert for the next instruction. It waits submissively, quieting its heart until the work is done: “But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content…”  Psalm 131:2. Please note “I” do this! I am the boss of my soul. So I make a choice to obey God, and trust Him, above and beyond my immediate circumstances.

Almighty God will not do this for me. I can pray and yell and carry on, and even blame Him – when the truth is, I still have the same ugly attitude I’ve had for years …It is my responsibility to tell my soul ‘this is what we are doing.’ The Holy Spirit will always help me – but I must personally make those hard choices and follow them through to the end. And the end comes when the job is done, not when I think I have had enough. It’s about submission. People want to rule and reign in this life – but Jesus Himself the One we follow, took on the role of a servant.

We waste a lot of time asking the Lord to give us stuff that can only be gained by eating, breathing, and growing the fruit of the Spirit. In this case, for Moses, it was self-control, faithfulness to obey, patience with a disobedient people and the peace that comes from a deliberate attention to detail. “To whom much is given, much will be required.”(Luke 12:48). Fruit grows over time, that means that these things will not just fall on us! Because fruit comes from within the tree.

And maturity develops within us as we trust Him more than our own understanding, practise devoted obedience to His will, His Way, and acknowledge Him in everything we do. Bye for now, 👋.

P 2722 Our attitude to making mistakes, matters.

/ DVH

Galatians 2:11-16: “When Cephas (Peter) came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? “We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.”

These verses show us a number of things. The primary one I want to speak about today, is that this is an example of the way we can sort things out with another believer. Paul spotted Peter’s hypocrisy and said so. He didn’t give into social pressure, instead he called out what he saw, when he saw it. What I understand from that action is — because we love each other, we need to watch each other’s backs, so that none of us miss out on fulfilling our heavenly calling. The thing that matters in what Paul did wasn’t confrontation, it was loving concern for this fledgling church.

The issue Paul mentioned is an important issue. Grace or works?? Unfortunately Peter, the Apostle — fell down the hole of agreeing with something that was not the gospel, because of FEAR. We must note when we read this that Peter was not challenged by anyone of the people who were already around him, instead … he was actually leading others astray. The real subject was not theology – it was GRACE. Was Grace going to lead them?

Sometimes, instead of just accepting the norm, in the name of not being divisive, it becomes necessary to challenge it. This must be done in a true spirit of humility and for God’s glory — not just to elevate or manipulate.The key is that you do it to protect someone else’s back, not because you think you are smarter, more right, or more spiritual than they are. I put those verses here today because they are the kind of verses we can easily read and think … yeah yeah yeah, Peter got it wrong… yada yada yada … meh …Paul is showing us how to deal with error.

. 

Meanwhile, there is no truth to the rumour that if I do nothing I can’t make mistakes. Doing nothing IS a mistake, unless the Holy Spirit is guiding you. Mistakes aren’t the enemy, fear is, and sometimes fear of making a mistake is an even bigger enemy!  Peter’s personal enemy was often FEAR too. That stuff showed up once in a boat as the disciples were crossing Lake Galilee in a storm. Peter dared to believe he could do what Jesus was doing. He went really well, walking on the water … until the circumstances distracted him and he sank! (There were other instances as well, but I have no room here!)

However, the Holy Spirit transformed this man of God at Pentecost into someone who seized the day, wherever he was. It totally looked like fear had been defeated, but then popped its ugly head up again in today’s story. Fear is like that. It goes away and comes back wearing another hat! This time fear looked like being non-partisan. This stuff often runs many people’s lives and they don’t even know it is happening, because they don’t admit it or recognise it – even to themselves. It will not kill us to be wrong!… Actually it can help us to die to self. We cannot follow Jesus and not die to self. 

We need to realise that dying to self is a lifestyle, not something we visit and walk past. Much later on in his life, Peter says this in 1 Peter 4:8“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”This is the real point. It is not about messing up, it is about the kind of faith that gets up and goes on!. We need to stop hoping that everyone else will make an exception for me in my sad, sorry little life, and man up and start choosing to changing ME! Almighty God’s power has not been weakened by the evil things that have previously happened to us. Read the book!

Peter is someone who I really appreciate. There are times when he has a big mouth and blurts out stuff better left unsaid. We know He made mistakes because he made public mistakes. One of the blessings of Peter’s life for me, is that it was obvious he was not perfect. Paul’s lesson impacts every single one of us. When we leave God’s Love behind, we leave Grace behind. Our attitude to mistakes will rule us if we let it. But let’s always remember that LOVE WILL RULE US FAR MORE EFFECTIVELY.  Bye👋